I would like a legacy.Execute() without the os.Exit(1)

[harve106]

What would you like to be added:
These lines of code in github.com\anchore\grype@v0.65.1\cmd\grype\cli\legacy\cmd.go

func ExecuteNoExit() {
	if err := rootCmd.Execute(); err != nil {
		_ = stderrPrintLnf(err.Error())
	}
}

Why is this needed:
I need it in order to use this function as I would the command line app because it's way easier to screen scrape than to go through APIs for simple usage

[kzantow]

Hi @harve106 -- there's an upcoming change to the way the CLI is built; it's this the PR. As part of that, there is a cli package that has a Command function, which allows you to get the root command.

In order to use this, you would just have to write something like:

package grype

import (
  "github.com/anchore/clio"
  "github.com/anchore/grype/cmd/cli"
)

func ExecuteGrype() {
  cmd := cli.Command(clio.Identification{
    Name: "my-app-name",
    Version: "my-app-version",
  })
  cmd.Execute()
}

In the case there is an error, Grype would still call os.Exit(exitCode), but it does not call os.Exit without errors.

Would this solve your issue?

[harve106]

Not quite, a lot of errors are not fatal and should not trigger an exit of the calling program. Go does not provide a good way for us to allow an OS.exit in a child process without exiting the parent. For certain applications output scraping is desirable, but calling something through a shell scraper is not for numerous reasons. That is the main reason I would like that functionality, to be able to scrape output even if there is an error without killing the parent process.

[harve106]

I have a PR that implements the functionality I would like with your old method of calling Execute(), #1436

[kzantow]

Hi @harve106, the aforementioned PR has been merged and you can run grype CLI using this code:

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"github.com/anchore/clio"
	"github.com/anchore/grype/cmd/grype/cli"
)

func executeGrype() {
	cmd := cli.Command(clio.Identification{
		Name:    "my-app-name",
		Version: "[not provided]",
	})
	_ = cmd.Execute()
}

func main() {
	executeGrype()
	fmt.Println("post-execute")
}

It does not call os.Exit.

However, I think it would be better to use Grype as a library. I took a stab at this and ended up running into a few issues, but would suggest we look at how to improve the experience of using Grype as a library. Could you expand on your use case at all?

[tgerla]

Hey @harve106, we'll go ahead and close this issue out but please feel free to let us know if you need any more help here. Thanks!